Are we predators or are we
not? In an attempt to see ourselves as natural beings, some argue
that humans are simply predators like some other animals.
Vegetarianism is then seen to be unnatural while the carnivorism
of other animals is made paradigmatic. Animal rights is criticized
"for it does not understand that one species supporting or being
supported by another is nature's way of sustaining life" (Ahlers
1990, 433). The deeper disanalogies with carnivorous animals
remain unexamined because the notion of humans as predators is
consonant with the idea that we need to eat meat. In fact,
carnivorism is true for only about 20 percent of nonhuman animals.
Can we really generalize from this experience and claim to know
precisely what "nature's way" is, or can we extrapolate the role
of humans according to this paradigm?

Some feminists have argued
that the eating of animals is natural because we do not have the
herbivore's double stomach or flat grinders and because
chimpanzees eat meat and regard it as a treat (Kevles 1990). This
argument from anatomy involves selective filtering. In fact, all
primates are primarily herbivorous. Though some chimpanzees have
been observed eating dead flesh—at the most, six times in a
month—some never eat meat. Dead flesh constitutes less than 4
percent of chimpanzees' diet; many eat insects, and they do not
eat dairy products (Barnard 1990). Does this sound like the diet
of human beings?

Chimpanzees, like most
carnivorous animals, are apparently far better suited to catching
animals than are human beings. We are much slower than they. They
have long-projecting canine teeth for tearing hide; all the
hominoids lost their long-projecting canines 3.5 million years
ago, apparently to allow more crushing action consistent with a
diet of fruits, leaves, nuts, shoots, and legumes. If we do manage
to get a hold of prey animals we cannot rip into their skin. It is
true that chimpanzees act as if meat were a treat. When humans
lived as foragers and when oil was rare, the flesh of dead animals
was a good source of calories. It may be that the "treat" aspect
of meat has to do with an ability to recognize dense sources of
calories. However, we no longer have a need for such dense sources
of calories as animal fat, since our problem is not lack of fat
but rather too much fat.

When the argument is made
that eating animals is natural, the presumption is that we must
continue consuming animals because this is what we require to
survive, to survive in a way consonant with living unimpeded by
artificial cultural constraints that deprive us of the experience
of our real selves. The paradigm of carnivorous animals provides
the reassurance that eating animals is natural. But how do we know
what is natural when it comes to eating, both because of the
social construction of reality and the fact
that our
history indicates a very mixed message about eating animals? Some
did; the majority did not, at least to any great degree.

The argument about what is
natural—that is, according to one meaning of it, not culturally
constructed, not artificial, but something that returns us to our
true selves —appears in a different context that always arouses
feminists' suspicions. It is often argued that women's
subordination to men is natural. This argument attempts to deny
social reality by appealing to the "natural." The "natural"
predator argument ignores social construction as well. Since we
eat corpses in a way quite differently from any other
animals—dismembered, not freshly killed, not raw, and with other
foods present—what makes it natural?

Meat is a cultural
construct made to seem natural and inevitable. By the time the
argument from analogy with carnivorous animals is made, the
individual making such an argument has probably consumed animals
since before the time she or he could talk. Rationalizations for
consuming animals were probably offered when this individual at
age four or five was discomfited upon discovering that meat came
from dead animals. The taste of dead flesh preceded the
rationalizations, and offered a strong foundation for believing
the rationalizations to be true, and baby boomers faced the
additional problem that as they grew up, meat and dairy products
had been canonized as two of the four basic food groups. (This
occurred in the 1950s and resulted from active lobbying by the
dairy and beef industry. At the turn of the century there were
twelve basic food groups.) Thus individuals have not only
experienced the gratification of taste in eating animals but may
truly believe what they have been told endlessly since
childhood—that dead animals are necessary for human survival. The
idea that meat eating is natural develops in this context.
Ideology makes the artifact appear natural, predestined. In fact,
the ideology itself disappears behind the facade that this is a
"food" issue.

We interact with
individual animals daily if we eat them. However, this statement
and its implications are repositioned so that the animal
disappears and it is said that we are interacting with a form of
food that has been named "meat." In The Sexual Politics of
Meat, I call this conceptual process in which the animal
disappears the structure of the absent referent. Animals in name
and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. If animals
are alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live
animal and animals become absent referents. Without animals there
would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of
eating meat because they have been transformed into food.

Animals are made absent
through language that renames dead bodies before consumers
participate in eating them. The absent referent permits us to
forget about the animal as an independent entity. The roast on the
plate is disembodied from the pig who she or he once was. The
absent referent also enables us to resist efforts to make animals
present, perpetuating a means-ends hierarchy.

The absent referent
results from and reinforces ideological captivity: partriarchal
ideology establishes the cultural set of human/animal, creates
criteria that posit the species difference as important in
considering who may be means and who may be ends, and then
indoctrinates us into believing that we need to eat animals.
Simultaneously, the structure of the absent referent keeps animals
absent from our understanding of patriarchal ideology and makes us
resistant to having animals made present. This means that we
continue to interpret animals from the perspective of human needs
and interests: we see them as usable and consumable. Much of
feminist discourse participates in this structure when failing to
make animals visible.

Ontology recapitulates
ideology. In other words, ideology creates what appears to be
ontological: if women are ontologized as sexual beings (or
rapeable, as some feminists argue), animals are ontologized as
carriers of meat. In ontologizing women and animals as objects,
our language simultaneously eliminates the fact that someone else
is acting as a subject/agent/perpetrator of violence. Sarah
Hoagland demonstrates how this works: "John beat Mary," becomes
"Mary was beaten by John," then "Mary was beaten," and finally,
"women beaten," and thus "battered women" (Hoagland 1988, 17-18).
Regarding violence against women and the creation of the term
"battered women," Hoagland observes that "now something men do
to women has become instead something that is a part of
women's nature. And we lose consideration of John entirely."

The notion of the animal's
body as edible occurs in a similar way and removes the agency of
humans who buy dead animals to consume them: "Someone kills
animals so that I can eat their corpses as meat," becomes "animals
are killed to be eaten as meat," then "animals are meat," and
finally "meat animals," thus "meat."

Something we do
to animals has become instead something that is a part of animals'
nature, and we lose consideration of our role entirely.

References

Ahlers, Julia.
Thinking like a mountain: Toward a sensible land ethic.
Christian Century (April 25): 433-34.

Barnard, Neal.
1990. The evolution of the human diet. In The power of your
plate. Summertown,
TN: Book Publishing Co.